Comparison of Syntactic Structures of the Old and Middle English Versions of Letter of Alexander to Aristotle

The primary purpose of this paper is to descriptively analyze the syntactic aspects of the Old and Middle English versions of Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle, and to find out similarities and differences of the two. The Old English version of Alexander s Letter analyzed here is contained in the MS. volume Cotton Vitellius A xv. Of the three extant ME manuscripts, was examined Dimarco & Perelman s edition (1978) chiefly based on the manuscript in Cambridge, University Library MS. Mm.5.29, which is believed to be virtually identical to the Latin origin. The main concerns of this paper are focused on the phrase structures, such as noun/adject, verb/adverb, genitive/noun, preposition/noun, non-finite verb/object, and some syntactic aspects are also discussed on word order patterns.